Schooling While Black: Discipline in U.S. Public Schools and the School-to-Prison Pipeline

Despite fifty years of desegregation and other significant school change efforts, students from disenfranchised social groups in the United States continue to receive substandard K-12 education and have significantly less access to higher education and other valued social opportunities and resources. In particular, black males are more severely punished, placed in lower ability groups, and likely to drop out of school than their white counterparts.

Societal notions of black maleness have no boundaries, and public schools are natural laboratories where practices emerge to produce black males as overly angry and deviant even from an early age. This link between schooling and the incarceration of black males is historically grounded in slavery and articulated in the present as the continued exclusion of blacks from public life via the prison industrial complex. In turn, public education has become the ultimate disciplinarian of black male children and youth.

The educational and sociological research is replete with scholarship that suggests that African American males are more frequently targeted for disciplinary action in greater numbers. Jacqueline Irvine’s research, for example, reveals that black pupils are statistically 2 to 5 times more likely to be suspended than their white counterparts. If the majority of school teachers come from middle-class and white communities, as the literature suggest that they do, wherein they have been racially primed to view blacks as the racial Other, it should be no surprise under these circumstances that black males are disciplined and punished for what they represent in contrast to what they actually do. Popular culture and media represent black males in general as overly criminal (see link), and the images of black males that most white teachers are familiar with are gained from these widespread cultural misrepresentations. These images [seem to] justify and facilitate the need to exercise more stringent school rules utilized by teachers to produce a context in which African American males are made to be “rule-breakers.”

This context allows us to make sense of the disproportionate disciplinary practices in which African American males are subjected. Guided by racialized images, teachers use knowledge generated from discourses about African American male behavior drawn from media sources to make sense of and understand the context and individuals around them. Teachers then apply power to act on this knowledge as they go about enacting their teaching practices. For teachers and students, this convergence of knowledge and power then functions as a power differential for black males in that teachers discipline them to “normalize” their behavior. That is, in their respective roles, teachers monitor students’ behavior by continually analyzing deviations from the codes of conduct generated by the white knowledge-power nexus. As part of the teachers’ role, individualization works in that it produces systems of normalization in which black males are sorted, ranked and evaluated on the basis of their behavior in a system that demands conformity based on “objective” rules constructed from white norms and power structure.

Accordingly, other educational scholars suggest that most of the discipline that African Americans receive is often subjectively determined wrongdoings. For example, simple infractions such as certain movements of the eyes or head are often taken as monumental actions which leads to a cascade of events resulting in misunderstandings, hurt feelings and, ultimately, discipline. Such social interaction between black male students and their white teachers are mistakenly thought to be behavior problems requiring “attitude adjustments.” Even clothing is a signifier of deviant behavior. Dress code is often most vigilant regarding boys’ style of dress. At the same time, unwritten rules about attire often brand black males as gang members, making teachers all the more determined to control the environment of the school and their classrooms. This suggests that young black males are under surveillance and expected to make mistakes, which is evident in the public school system where African American boys overwhelming experience the brunt of disciplinary sanctions. Black male student relationships with their teachers are the first step toward the institutionalization of conforming behavior that emanates from the worldview and the social environment of white teachers.

Black males, youth in particular, experience anger and frustration on a routine basis. These racial slights that occur daily, often in the form of microaggressions, are confusing for youth and cause a myriad of emotions from pain and sadness to anger and self-hatred. For white America to demand our young Black men to decipher the images they see and reactions they receive, and further, to expect them to conform to White perceptions is outright disingenuous, if not appalling, to say the least.

Additionally, the stresses of puberty while discovering one’s social role are exacerbated in the African American male with the “psychological stresses of hypermasculinity, stereotyping of minority cultures, and the perception of ‘otherness’ in a predominantly white society,” as Stuart Hall expressed. Scholars have identified important links between these stresses in young people and social phenomena including school alienation and academic underachievement, teen delinquency, teenage pregnancy, depression, suicide, homicide, and school violence. And as our young boys turn into African American men, these stresses have a consequence for their health and, ultimately, their future.

3 Comments

The zero tolerance discipline approach has had a devastating impact upon black male students and has not improved discipline nor school culture; however, there is another approach to discipline that has been proven to not only transform black males but also transform school culture. It is called Restorative Practices. I believe it works because it is not about punishment for wrongdoing but its focus is on preventing wrongdoing by recreating the school into an place where all students and adults are valued and respected.

exactly 🙂 i understand that social science is seen in several corners as “junk science” (except economics, physical anthropology and archaeology), however let us not forget that the visual strategies that under-gird this system of non-material culture seek to reinforce systematically a set of de-humanizing(black men are dogs, bunnies, whatever) or infantilizing discourses, with an express purpose from an early age to anchor forms of self-hatred inside of them – their burgeoning subjectivity – in a way that guarantees later, formal criminalized behavior.

I don’t know how it downloaded on to my phone, but your article on “Whiteness” was there and I read it with a great deal of curiosity. You see, we live in Utah and have several white neighbors who have adopted and raised black children, who are productive members of society.
We also have had a young black teenager from Philadelphia, live in our home for several months. Michael attended high school in Utah, and despite wanting to keep him here and graduate from high school, we were not able to gain guardianship, because his aunt would not provide us with his mother’s death certificate. When Michael returned to Philadelphia, he tried to go back to high school there, but other black students in his school, would not allow the teacher to teach. They prescribed to an often tauted American black culture axiom, that to study and improve intellectually, was to “try act white”.
Philadelphia has had a black mayor and a great deal of black influence on the school board, yet the black children in the inner city school system were being deprived of an education, by the fact that the other blacks kept them from it. I would assume that this is the case in many inner cities. It was not a matter of not having enough money to run the schools, it was that no one in the black community, took the initiative to remedy a decades old problem. There are no whites who are inserting their “whiteness”,to suppress black education. In Michael’s case, it was a matter of blacks culture inflicting it’s lack of initiative to demand that children sit down, behave and take personal responsibility for their own learning. It has become a vicious circle, and there has bed plenty of oportunity for blacks to improve their lives, as a whole, but those in authority are too timid to take ownership and give the problem more than lip service.

Eventually, we encouraged Michael to enroll in an online education, to which he proudly graduated from, a couple of years later. We attended his graduation via the internet. Those who were graduating, we’re predominantly black. They were children of initiative and they will most likely go on to live productive lives, while the other 90% will stay in the inner city and most likely live off of our tax dollars.

It has been four years since Michael left our home, but he still calls us “Mom” and “Dad” and we still talk at least once or twice a week. We encourage Michael to further his education and to seek employment. He has done as well as he can, in spite of other’s living off his Social Security income, and we try to help out financially, whenever he asks.

When Michael was mugged in his own neighborhood and his money and cell phone taken, it wasn’t a group of whites that accausted him, it was black kids that he recognized from school. It took place in front of a fire station run by other blacks, who would not intervien, for fear of retaliation.

Most crime in the inner cities, is black on black crime. In spite of the thousands of social programs out there to help blacks, the black community has continued to perpetuate mediocrity, and not demand law and order. To blame whites is so convenient, but until successful bkack leaders stop accentuating the .01% of white on black crime, and start insisting that their own Community take responsibility for millions of black children being born out of wedlock and strapping single mothers with the responsibility of trying to work and raise two and three children from indigent fathers, self inflicted predudice will continue to dominate the black community.

It is so frustrating for those of us who are white, to see blacks continue to blame whites, when we are so aware of the elephant in the room, and it won’t free itself from the chains that it has placed on itself. We have made so many strides in multicultural relations in our country, until the Obama administration started accentuating every little white on black whatever. There is predudice on both sides, but it was becoming miniscule, until black racebaiters decided to put their disengenuous blame on whites, instead of putting their efforts into improving their own social shortcomings. In many ways, it is a conservative vs liberal approach to an issue that was being remedied, until the liberal approach dug its heals in. Rush Limbaugh said it best- “The soft bigotry on the Left, is low expectations. When you start to blame others for your own shortcomings, and don’t take responsibility for your own Community and culture, you only short change yourself and society on the whole.